One Deetentee

A founding team with years of business experience, teamfocus launches its collaborative task system, re-imagining the way companies approach project management. It creates a modern web application aimed at keeping teams in sync.
teamfocus solves the problems created by an increasingly distributed workforce, providing organizations with the ability to easily keep track of tasks and work assignments.

*Strong encryption enables teamfocus customers to store data without third parties ever being able to see the data

*Since the NSA spying scandal, trust in the industry is weak. Security is the most vital element customers look for in cloud services. teamfocus is private and secure.

*CBI reports the percentage of companies with remote workers increased from 45% in 2007 to nearly 60% in 2011, increasing the demand for product management services

*The Australian startup scene is flourishing; teamfocus aims to be the next breakout success from down-under

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Co-founder & CEO Kevin Withnall began development of teamfocus three years ago, initially for his 12-person development company. Rather than trying to stay organized through emails, spreadsheets and meetings, he wanted a system that was more agile, and one that could better manage tasks.

teamfocus intuitively complements the rise in remote product management, and it provides a powerful solution to the associated challenges. “For the last decade or so, the way people work and communicate with one another in teams has gone through dramatic and rapid changes,” says Withnall, who has founded multiple development firms before co-founding teamfocus.

“We created teamfocus because we didn’t see a product fulfilling the need in the market. teamfocus was built to be the world’s most complete collaborative task system”, added the Australian innovator.

According to a CBI study, between 2007 and 2011 the percentage of companies with remote workers increased from approximately 45% to close to 60%. And this number is only expected to increase, creating a larger demand for product management services like teamfocus.
teamfocus is fully customizable, and is suitable for any workflow, ranging from a simple to-do list to an organization’s complete work process.

The product provides team members with one central location, where they can see what their peers are working on, and easily tell how a project is progressing. The B2B software is a comprehensive product, and was designed from the start to evolve as organizations grow.

A key teamfocus feature is the use of Workflows, where tasks are forced to flow through a pre-determined set of steps to ensure nothing is missed. They also help identify the cause of bottlenecks. A full API, to be released later this year, allows companies to use teamfocus workflows and storage in their own applications.

Another unique feature allows users to store tasks without teamfocus ever seeing any of the data. This is achieved by encrypting the tasks/data at the client end. The NSA spying scandal dealt a heavy blow to customer trust in traditional cloud services, raising serious concerns over user privacy. The large services used by major online service providers such as Dropbox, Google Docs and Facebook also mean bigger risks.

“Public cloud services are all built on the foundation of the data center, and it’s a treasure trove of personal information that’s vulnerable to data breaches, or vulnerable to being accessed by the service providers,” said Withnall. teamfocus allows users to create and keep their own encryption keys in their browser so that the datacentre only ever sees an encrypted version.

This therefore means that teamfocus represents the most secure option for the public. Studies have shown that security is the most vital element for customers looking for cloud storage devices, with cloud hosting company Peer1 finding that 96% of those surveyed considered this to be the most important factor.

Despite the well-funded competition, teamfocus believes it can compete well in the marketplace. Says Co-Founder Jason Weaver, “We believe the beauty of the task management market is that the best product can win. We’ve spent three years building and validating teamfocus, and we – and our clients – believe this is the best product in the market, with a set of features not found in any other task management software.”

The issue that many people are finding with the current offerings of online task managers is that they quickly hit a barrier in terms of the scope of the product and its ability to grow. Simply put, people can quickly outgrow the system they have just signed up for. This is where teamfocus is different. teamfocus is fully customisable and so grows as your business expands.

Innovative companies from the Australian start-up scene continue to flourish, with organizations such as Atlassian, Health Engine, HiSeis, and Agworld receiving international attention and funding. Investors are also entering the space, including Qualcomm Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, and Telstra. teamfocus is aiming to be the next breakout success from the country down-under.

teamfocus is free for the first three users, with a monthly charge for subsequent users’ subscriptions.

The company also provides customized enterprise solutions.
teamfocus was founded in 2010 by Kevin Withnall and Jason Weaver. Withnall previously worked with MSN in Australia, and is the founder and CEO of a 12-person development firm. Weaver has come from roles as an eBusiness Manager with a large Health insurance company, and as a Project Manager at ING.

The teamfocus mission is to create a product that can best manage workflow between teams. teamfocus is the world’s most complete collaborative task system.
Learn more about teamfocus at: http://www.teamfocus.me

About teamfocus
teamfocus was founded in 2010, when Kevin Withnall and Jason Weaver came together to solve a common problem: managing workflow between teams.
Contact Information
Kevin Withnall, Co-Founder Mobile: (+61 412 453846) Skype: (kevinwithnall)
Email: kevin(at)teamfocus(dot)me Website: http://www.teamfocus.me

Open source software company Red Hat has agreed to acquire software-defined storage company Inktank, whose object and block storage technology helps customers scale their cloud storage to the exabyte-level on cost-effective commodity hardware.

According to its Wednesday announcement, Red Hat will pay approximately $175 million in cash for Inktank in a deal that’s expected to close in May 2014. Inktank began in 2012 when it was spun out of web host and cloud services provider DreamHost.

With its own GlusterFS-based storage offering, Red Hat is positioned to become a leader in open, software-defined storage.

Inktank uses the open source, software-defined storage system known as Ceph, which it is quickly gaining popularity among users of the OpenStack framework. According to the OpenStack Foundation, approximately 20 percent of all OpenStack clouds deploy Ceph for block storage.

Inktank’s main offering, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, allows users to run production Ceph clusters at scale and improve the economics and management of storage on public and private clouds.

DreamHost had led to the development of Inktank, but also Ceph itself. DreamHost’s co-founder and CTO Sage Weil was among the key people involved in the creation of Ceph about a decade ago.

In 2004, while working on his Ph.D., Weil was part of the research team at UC Santa Cruz that did early work on Ceph, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. After gaining his doctorate, he continued work on Ceph with a small team of engineers at DreamHost which eventually became Inktank.

In 2011 Bryan Bogensberger, a senior executive at DreamHost, developed the business plan for spinning out Inktank. With Bogensberger at the helm as president and COO, the company launched in 2012 with an initial startup investment of $5 million from DreamHost before attracting outside investment.

Inktank’s first customer was also DreamHost, which used Inktank to support DreamHost’s object storage service, DreamObjects, the first public commercial deployment of Ceph, with its September 2013 beta launch. DreamObjects has now served more than 10,000 users.

It’s now expected that Red Hat’s backing of Inktank will drive further development of the open-source Ceph project, and help more organizations use this technology in cloud computing environments.

Red Hat EVP and CTO Brian Stevens said in a statement, “Inktank has done a brilliant job assembling a strong ecosystem around Ceph and we look forward to expanding on this success together. The strength of these world-class open storage technologies will offer compelling capability as customers move to software-based scale-out storage systems.”

Cloud-based website monitoring and software analytics provider New Relic has raised $100 million in financing that will be put towards product development and expanding the company’s international presence.

The funding comes from a Series F round led by BlackRock, Inc. and Passport Capital, LLC, and also involved participation from T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Wellington Management.

According to tech blog Re/code, a source familiar with the deal places New Relic’s total valuation at around $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion.

New Relic is among a handful of application performance monitoring solutions that isolate and analyze the root causes of errors within software stacks, some of which have grown increasingly complex with the adoption of cloud architecture.

In October 2013, New Relic began providing real-time application performance monitoring for Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System cloud infrastructure, allowing developers to quickly see if their applications are running properly in hybrid cloud environments.

Last month, New Relic launched a real-time SaaS analytics platform known as “New Relic Insights,” which allows users to get Big Data insights from collected data.

Headquartered in San Francisco, New Relic opened first international office, in Dublin, Ireland, in February. With this new funding, it is planning on further expanding internationally in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne said in a statement, “This funding will help us further accelerate company momentum on a global basis, build out our presence among large enterprises and develop both new and existing products, including our real-time analytics platform to enable more organizations make better data-driven business decisions.”

This week, NETmundial released a report on the conclusions from their“Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance.” The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) submitted public comments in advance of this meeting, many of which were incorporated in the final NETmundial statement. Below is a statement from i2Coalition Co-Founder and Public Policy Working Group Chair David Snead in response to this report.

“The I2Coalition approached the Netmundial process as a global brainstorming session, and believes that in that regard it was successful. While some may be disappointed that the report does not directly address their concerns, we believe that the process has helped point the Internet community, and currently existing Internet governance organizations, in a direction that will allow them to concentrate on concrete outcomes to the major issues raised in the final report.

“We particularly embrace statements in the report that hold up the development and innovation potential that the Internet provides. In particular, the NETmundial report states that, ‘The ability to innovate and create has been at the heart of the remarkable growth of the Internet and it has brought great value to the global society. For the preservation of its dynamism, Internet governance must continue to allow permissionless innovation through an enabling Internet environment, consistent with other principles in this document. Enterprise and investment in infrastructure are essential components of an enabling environment.’

“As an organization that represents those that build the nuts and bolts of the Internet, we fully understand the role of innovation in the digital economy. Each of our members is deeply committed to helping facilitate the growth of the global digital economy.

“We welcome the report’s frequent emphasis on the multistakeholder model of Internet governance. The Netmundial process has shown that businesses, civil society, individuals and governments can work effectively together to help move the Internet governance process forward. We support statements in the NetMundial report emphasizing that governments should continue to have advisory roles in Internet governance, and not stewardship roles.

“Importantly, the report addressed and issue of key concern to our members: jurisdictional and standards based decisions. By highlighting the importance of global connectivity, and open standards, the report helps emphasize the importance of a unified Internet. Fracturing the Internet within governmental boundaries goes against the very nature of the Internet’s growth. By promoting open standards developed from a multistakeholder discussion that are consistent with global human rights we can allow innovation to continue. The global nature of the Internet is imperative.

“Incorporating each of these issues within a multistakeholder approach will allow the Internet to continue to grow in the innovative environment in which it currently exists. The Internet was built from the bottom up, and should move forward in the same manner. However, forward movement should not be an excuse for lack of accountability. The Internet community needs to ensure accountability for all who come to the table in this discussion. We believe the report helps underscore this need. Accountability must have an ongoing, central role in all Internet governance discussions. As debate moves forward on the proposed IANA transition from the NTIA, an increased level of accountability is critical.

“While NETmundial’s multistakeholder report is a non-binding outcome of a bottom-up, open, and participatory process involving thousands of people from governments, private sector, civil society, technical community, and academia from around the world, it may prove to be a helpful push in the direction of a fuller, outcome oriented, discussion of these issues within the context of Internet governance in general. i2Coalition was proud to be a participant in this conversation, and looks forward to ensuring that our industry’s critical voice is heard in subsequent discussions.”

About i2Coalition

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) supports those who build the nuts and bolts of the Internet, and we treat it like the noble profession that it is. We believe the continued growth of the Internet is vital for growing an environment of innovation and seek to engage in ways to foster success of the Internet and Internet infrastructure industry. We seek to influence decision makers to weigh decisions on whether they are good or bad for the Internet economy and its foundational industries. In short, we seek to foster growth within the Internet infrastructure industry by driving others to harness the Internet’s full potential. To learn more about i2Coalition, visit www.i2Coalition.com.

IDF/Connect today announces that it has obtained from CA Technologies validation for its SSO/Rest solution for CA SiteMinder®. SSO/Rest opens up exciting new capabilities for SSO infrastructures based on CA SiteMinder, including new integration methods and the ability to protect applications “in the cloud”.

The CA Validation program is designed to provide a standard process to verify technology partners’ integrated products. Specific criteria must be met including confirming a technology partners’ integrated solution correctly installs, configures, and performs as described by the technology partner.

Richard Sand, CEO of IDF/Connect, explains: “SSO/Rest extends the reach of CA SiteMinder into the cloud while preserving the full power of SiteMinder functionality. From the standpoint of the SiteMinder administrator, there is no difference between the application residing in the cloud and applications within the local data center. SSO/Rest effectively solves the challenges of Web Access Management for the cloud”.

The SSO/Rest solution is comprised of the SSO/Rest Gateway and SSO/Rest Agents. The SSO/Rest Gateway provides a complete HTTP REST-based interface to the SiteMinder API. The Gateway has been hardened and secured to safely provide enterprise SSO, authentication, session management, and access management over the Internet and to the public cloud.

The SSO/Rest Agents can be used in public cloud Infrastructure or Platform-as-a-Service environments in lieu of traditional CA SiteMinder agents, so that SiteMinder customers can use their existing SiteMinder infrastructure to manage these applications as if they were located on-premise.

Aaron Berman, CA security product advisor, adds: “Organizations today require maximum flexibility in their single sign-on and access management solutions to meet the changing needs of the enterprise demanded by application owners. SSO/Rest enhances the already flexible approach CA SiteMinder has taken to provide both loosely coupled and tightly coupled architectural solutions, allowing IT to continue to leverage and build upon their SiteMinder implementations with cloud, mobile and web 2.0 applications”

Additional Details:

SSO/Rest employs a flexible infrastructure, using standards-based components and technologies. It can be deployed in any J2EE servlet container (Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, Websphere).

SSO/Rest endpoints can be called by any browser or mobile rich-content framework, such as AJAX, Adobe Flex, and Microsoft Silverlight, It supports plain text, JSON, and XML payloads.

SSO/Rest supports the most current versions of SiteMinder, simplifying deployment of the solution. It has been tested with CA SiteMinder R12, and R12.5.

SSO/Rest is available for sale directly from IDF Connect or on CA’s Cloud Commons marketplace

IDF Connect, Inc. is a software products and managed services company based in Wilmington, Delaware, that provides enterprise-grade Identity and Access Management products, solutions, and services engineered specially to provide a homogeneous coexistence of traditional “on-premise” Identity and Access Management technologies with the new Cloud-based infrastructure and applications. IDF/Connect is a member of CA Technologies Technology Partner Program.

What if you were able to find a host that gave you flexibility, saved you money, and provided great service? Compare the cost, features and benefits of each website hosting provider before choosing one. The information that follows should give you an idea if you’re getting a good deal for your money.

Most web hosts offer various add-ons in their packages, but the number of features may differ from one host to another. When comparing hosting services, you should make certain that you are making comparisons based on the specific features required by your website. You might like the price of one host, but then discover that the features you need require further funds to acquire.

Select several providers you are interested in, and keep their contact information. If your first choice turns out to be problematic, you’ll be able to move quickly without having to start your search from scratch.

Establish a list of everything you are looking for in a web host. Determine your business goals and needs, so that you can look at each host and decide if they will be able to help you meet them. This way, your decision won’t mistakenly be made based only on price; you will know that all your needs are being met.

Are you considering a free web-hosting company for a website? Back up everything on your site, since many free hosts don’t have backup services. You get exactly what you have paid for in this case. If there is a system failure or downtime, you may be stuck without any recourse if you site or certain files disappear.

Billing for web hosting services is correlated with the amount of visitors your site receives in a given time period. Will it be a flat rate? A rate dependent on the amount of traffic you get?

To ensure a safe website, it may be wise to pay a little extra to obtain the secure server certificate. You can add this button to your website so customers feel it is a more trustworthy website to visit.

To increase your overall profit margins, research the prices of the hosting companies gunning for your business. Web hosting costs vary from $2 to $50 a month or more, and many times, the cheaper services have better reliability. A higher price usually means more bandwidth, but this is not a guarantee that you will not have less downtime.

Free web hosts are available if you’re looking to save money. This does mean, however, that ads will be appearing on your site, and also your storage space will be limited too. If you want your site to look professional, though, stay away from free hosting.

Now you have the knowledge of how to judge providers of web hosting to determine if they offer what you require. Choosing the right provider will take some research and comparison. Use the tips above to expedite your search and find the website hosting service that can take your business to the next level.

Affiliate marketing becomes more relevant as technology advances. Read this article to learn more about Web marketing and how you could develop a campaign that is adapted to your audience. Try out these hints to win with online marketing.

You must take advantage of every software and technology advancement in order to be successful in Online marketing. A company that fails to take advantage of the newest technology and trends may not appear competent or credible in the eyes of prospective customers. You should always be up-to-date and follow trends, or try starting trends yourself.

Offer a short-term incentive or promotion to boost your site’s PageRank. You will end up essentially buying a better PageRank, as other sites, such as deal collection sites and consumer watch sites, will link back to you. This is similar to a store selling a loss leader item to turn a profit later.

Start small when you are first setting out with marketing your product or service on a new website. Search engines will be more likely to overlook your site when it has a million or two indexed pages, than when it only has ten to twenty thousand.

Affiliate Marketing

A solid Affiliate marketing campaign will procure more buzz for your business and lead to additional opportunities for Affiliate marketing. It sounds a bit strange, but the basic idea here is to create a cycle of customers and a system wherein users search, find your business, buy your products, and then the cycle repeats.

Deciding how you want your website to progress can be a hard task. To start off, you need to narrow down all of your interests until you find the one you enjoy the most. It is best to pick a niche that you know about, and that you enjoy. Having a definite goal will make marketing your site a lot easier.

If you are good at creating an Ezine, it can be an on-going effective marketing technique where you can build a following with the people who subscribe to it. You can show your personality by adding photos of you along with your family and staff. Have fun with your articles by interjecting bits of humor or funny stories about your employees. Use a catchy subject line when you write the Ezine, in order to pique people’s curiosity. For instance, have the title refer to the fastest or simplest way to attain a certain goal.

For the most part, internet promotion is very similar to other forms of marketing except for the manner of delivering information. As an example, title tags may stop being a focus of search engines. If things get changed up, you should be willing to change your approach as well, like putting an effort into marketing via videos.

Popular Products

With a solid plan for internet promotion, you can already tell which of your products make you the most money. These should be your mainstays in drawing future sales. Come up with other items that can support and supplement your most popular products. The popular products then can boost sales for other products, and make more advertising unnecessary.

Web marketing really is not that complicated. If you utilize these tips, you will gain much success in your venture.

Kingsoft president Wang Yulin told China Daily that the new Kingsoft cloud service platform provides advantages for security, gaming, and smart device industries.

New cloud-based storage application, Kingsoft Kuaipan Commercial, is designed to allow small and medium-sized businesses to store and share documents on multiple platforms including Windows, OS X, Android and iOS. Pricing starts at 125 yuan (about $20) per month.

The Kingsoft Cloud Platform, according to the company, also provides a platform for larger enterprises and cloud application developers.

Kingsoft Cloud Group has also collaborated with a local TV manufacturer and Xiaomi, a smartphone maker that also owns a stake in Kingsoft Cloud Group, to provide cloud storage to TV and mobile phone users. The company has also revealed a close relationship with Xiao router, and more partnerships, the company says, will be announced this year.

Kingsoft had previously launched cloud services geared towards enterprises, but also the free cloud storage service, Kuaipan Individual. Launched in 2011, Kuaipan Individual now has 40 million users. The company has said it plans to increase the storage room and bandwidth for users.

Yulin told China Daily that the Chinese cloud services market has enormous potential, and that it can accommodate multiple vendors. Indeed, as local cloud service providers like Aliyun (Alibaba’s cloud division) and foreign companies like Amazon enter the market by partnering with local infrastructure partners, China will likely have many cloud providers to choose from.

As more and more of our daily lives take place online, more and more people want to have their own websites. Regardless of why you decide to build your own site, you first need to learn some important factors about the concept of web hosting. This article can help you start.

Look into what add-ons and additional features that the different hosts offer. As you compare your options, you should also take into consideration the expected service levels and support for each of the most important features. For instance, one host may offer a low price package, but you can find you really have to get the higher priced package to get the feature you want.

Is shared or dedicated web hosting the best for your business? If your site is huge and complicated and you get a lot of viewers, shared hosting may inhibit your growth and advancement. You may be better off with dedicated hosting.

Research backup host sites when you find certain aspects of the web hosting services unfavorable. Thus, you will be able to make an informed decision when the need to change hosts becomes imminent.

Web Host

Lump-sum payments can save you money at a web host, but monthly payments give you more flexibility. You can’t predict what your business will be or what your host will do in the upcoming months. If your web host’s service goes down the toilet or you end up having your account closed for a breach of terms of service, you’ll lose out on what you’ve already paid.

You should make sure you choose a web page hosting service that gives you enough space to grow your site. Will you have the storage space to expand your website if needed? Gaining access to 100 MB of disk space should be sufficient for developing your site.

Depending on what kind of traffic and how much your site gets, is how web page hosting companies will charge you. You need to know how much it will cost you, a lot of places have flat rates or it can go up and down depending on your visits.

When looking at hosting packages with unlimited services, proceed with caution. A website hosting provider offering unlimited disk space, for example, could put limitations on the types of files you are allowed to upload and store. The unlimited bandwidth claims may actually be part of a tiered pricing system. Get all the information on these plans and don’t assume that unlimited is actually unlimited.

User Friendly

Look for web hosts that give a cPanel. A cPanel is quite user friendly and makes it simple for you to include popular applications on your site. These applications are usually user friendly and typically easy to install. As an added bonus, your website management will be much more efficient!

Hosting decisions can appear difficult, but this article should have helped you see that it is quite manageable. It’s a matter of taking what you’ve learned and putting it into action. Once you take this step, your blog or website will be better positioned for success.

SAP is making its Business Suite available via cloud as a subscription service, the company announced Tuesday. SAP also announced on Monday that it has established its first two data centers in the Asia Pacific region, which will help support its cloud offerings.

SAP plans to migrate customers to the cloud with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, citing McLaren, Schaidt Innovations and Levi Strauss as early adopters of the service. The company is offering its flagship product Business Suite, as well as Business Warehouse and the SAP HANA platform on a subscription basis, and delivering them in a private managed cloud environment.

SAP announced HANA Cloud Platform in March, so making its suite of business applications available via cloud is a continuation of SAP’s move into cloud services. That move includes a January decision to increase investment in cloud services and forecast higher revenues from them.

“Today is a significant step forward for SAP’s transformation, as we are not only emphasizing our commitment to the cloud with new subscription offerings for SAP HANA, we are also increasing the choice and simplicity to deploy SAP HANA,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG, Products & Innovation. “In addition, we are expanding our global presence with a comprehensive in memory-centric data center plan, dramatically simplifying our customers’ IT landscapes.”

Prices are not included in the announcement, but will likely be comparable to rival Oracle, which has embraced cloud computing much more quickly, and to other cloud business app offerings, such as those offered by Netsuite and Salesforce.

SAP has also bolstered its migration services to help existing customers transition to the cloud and integrate cloud and on-premise services. Existing maintenance agreements for support and upgrade of migrated apps will be honored by SAP.

Previously, enterprises could subscribe to SAP HANA as a cloud service through partners Savvis or HP, which provide the hosting and in HP’s case the platform.